The Legality of Corporations as People
If you’ve recently watched The Colbert Report, you may be aware that titular pundit Stephen Colbert is currently campaigning for a referendum in his home state of South Carolina that would deny corporations the rights of people. Colbert, it seems, is disgruntled about the fact that corporations enjoy the same legal status as people, which is to say that they have first amendment rights and certain protections under the law. Of course, they also enjoy the rights of a corporation, which people don’t necessarily have. The proposed referendum on the ballot would read as follows: “In order to address the matter of Corporate Personhood, the enfranchised People of the Sovereign State of South Carolina shall decree that 1) Corporations are people, or 2) Only people are people.” When you look at it that way it seems pretty obvious. So how did corporations even gain the legal status of “people” in the first place?
In truth, the debate may have started as far back as the 14th amendment, when all persons born or naturalized in the United States were labeled as citizens and given all the privileges and immunities that citizenship granted. Although it wasn’t until 1914 that the U.S. Supreme Court actually conferred these rights upon corporations (in Dartmouth College v. Woodward) the same protections that were given to citizens may have been upheld for corporations even before the Supreme Court ruling. And there have been arguments ever since about the legality of allowing corporations to enjoy the same rights and responsibilities as individual people.
Those that are in agreement with corporate personhood seem to be of the opinion that corporations are just a collection of people, and should therefore be treated as people. However, this is a fallacious argument, if only for the fact that a person makes an individual choice for which he or she is individually responsible, while a corporation makes collective choices that are in the best interest of the company, not necessarily the individual people that work there.
For example, suppose that a corporation wanted to contribute to a political campaign because a certain contender was in favor of deregulating the industry so that the company could face more lenient environmental standards. Obviously, individuals within the organization might not agree with either of these goals on a personal level, but because the company is acting as a person, it doesn’t require a consensus to act on the behalf of all. Of course, this is just one of the murky areas in which people are worried the issue of corporate personhood will go, and they should be considering that just last year the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot stop corporations to contributing to political campaigns. What’s next? The right to bear arms? It’s bad enough they have the money and power to control the press and put a president in office to do their bidding. Soon they could be influencing religious practices and exercising the right to plead the 5th.
The idea here is that corporations can’t really be treated like people because they aren’t individual people. They need to be governed by a separate set of laws that takes into account their specialized status as business entities that are comprised of individuals that may or may not know what the company is doing and may or may not agree with it. A corporation has goals and engages in actions that have nothing to do with the majority of its employees, and since the individual has limited rights within the corporation, so too should the corporation have limited rights within countries across the globe.
Shirley Simpson is a contributing writer for www.PowMac.com, the premier DUI attorney Charlotte NC.